"The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway

If you’ve never read Hemingway, this is a fine place to start. It’s short stories, so you can dip in without committing to a novel, and you’ll quickly see why people still talk about him.

Nick Adams is a young man who moves through these stories much as Hemingway moved through his own early life. We meet him as a boy in the woods of northern Michigan, fishing and camping with his father. We follow him through his first encounters with violence and death, and later as a young man shaped by war, trying to find his footing when he comes home. The stories were collected after Hemingway’s death, in 1972, and they arrange his Nick Adams pieces in the order of Nick’s life, so you can read them as a portrait of one man growing up.

Hemingway writes in plain, spare sentences, and he leaves the most important things unsaid. That sounds simple, but it hits hard. You’ll find quiet scenes by a trout stream that carry more feeling than a page of explanation, and “Big Two-Hearted River” is a good example. If you want to know what all the fuss is about, these stories show it.

This is a paperback in acceptable condition, which means a well-read copy with visible wear, but complete and readable. It’s a good value for a good first taste of a Nobel Prize winner. Find it at Dead Tree Dreams.